Coming Soon!

Look out for our new range of jewellery incorporating the simply beautiful Jarina, which is known as Tagua in Spanish. Jarina comes from a large husky nut which grows on a palm tree in the Western Amazon near the Colombian border. It is known in English as Vegetable Ivory because of its remarkable similarity to ivory.

Up until recently it was predominately carved into all manner of shapes and pieces that originally could only be produced with elephant ivory, but now more and more it's being sliced, dyed and polished for use in eco-jewellery.

Not only is it extremely hard-wearing and gorgeous to look at, but it also accepts different coloured natural dyes, and its cultivation and harvesting within the greater Amazonian area is reckoned to keep some 35,000 people gainfully employed, as well as avoiding loggers chopping down trees to plant soya for biofuels. It not only saves the trees - but also the elephants!

Focus Brazil

Brazil Creates New Indian Reservation

Kudos to Brazil’s President Lula who on Friday decreed a new 3.8 million acre Indian reservation in the heart of the Amazon rain forest's logging frontier. The Bau Reservation in Para had been sought by the Kayapo Indians in their ancestral territory since 1994 but resistance from settlers and loggers slowed its official creation.

Brazil's 1988 constitution declared that all Indian ancestral lands be demarcated and turned over to Indian tribes within five years. While that process has not yet been completed, today about 11% of Brazilian territory and nearly 22 % of the Amazon is in Indian hands. It is reckoned that there are about 1 million Indians in Brazil - about half of them on reservations.

However there has been increasing pressure on the government to limit the size of reservations as logging, ranching and farming expand into the Amazon and some settlers have violently resisted efforts to relocate them.

Studies show that Indian reservations tend to be the best preserved areas of the rain forest because the tribes protect the borders. National parks and ecological reserves rarely have enough staff to police their territory.

Source: The Associated Press